Issue No. 6, Autumn 2013

What does it mean,
To wake up on the brink of thirty,
Restless, heavy
From purple and blue dreams,
(Weird, vampire dreams)
To then walk into a crisp day,
(A white and yellow day)
Thinking about race, and otherness, and Gilda across time
And on the walk, be blown away by gusts of wind
Thankful, all along, for some sense (a fleeting sense) of tangible mutability
And then to walk through dank corridors, warm
(much too warm)
Into white labs
(to talk about rhetoric)
Into conversations of eighteen-year olds
About weird dreams of drunk parents, siblings, frat parties, and werewolf virility?

Aishwarya lives in Arkansas. She has a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. She is interested in gender, identity formation and the shaping of subjectivities in literature and popular culture. Her article, “Urban Retro-Futuristic Masculinities in China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station” was published by the Journal of Popular Culture in 2012. Her non-academic work has not been published before.